Grand Theft Auto V Reviews: The Review

The internet has really done it this time - if you thought the reviews for Grand Theft Auto IV were good, the reviews for Grand Theft Auto V absolutely blow them out of the water, both in terms of word count and hyperbole. The reviews are massive and detailed - it's clear that videogame journalists have really put the time in to make these reviews as huge and enthusiastic as we've come to expect from videogame blogs and news outlets. Words like "perfect", "masterpiece," and "revolutionary" are only the tip of the iceberg here.

It's been 5 years since the last major Grand Theft Auto round of reviews, and in the time since then, the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds - and it shows. There's so much more going on beneath the review-engine too: elaborate videos, nicely animated .gifs, and finely-crafted image galleries will keep you occupied whenever you grow tired of the main review. There's more to do in these reviews than in almost any review you'll partake in this year. All in all, they should run you somewhere around 30 hours of review-time. Really, a wall-to-wall technical achievement.

That's not to say the internet simply delivered exactly what you expected - there were (as always) some surprises in the GTA V reviews: complaints of sexism, annoyances about the problematic story structure and its effects on gameplay, suggestions of the contextualization of the violence in the game, etc. The result is a more nuanced take on the classic GTA review formula, and the experience is all the more rich and complex for it.

Overall, it's hard to argue that the reviews for GTA V failed to exceed even our wildest expectations. These reviews are ambitious, overreaching, and mind-bogglingly huge - absolutely the gold-standard for modern reviews, with a level of polish that can only be expected from a GTA review. It'll be very interesting to see them try to top this with GTA VI reviews, since these are the Citizen Kane(s) of game reviews.